The Stench Of Hypocrisy

The Australian Council of Trade Unions' TV ad campaign against the Howard Government's Industrial Relations reforms follows the usual left-wing pattern of treating the population like a pack of stupid, scared children.

Like the majority of Labor ads during an election campaign, they contain sad-faced actors playing whinging Wendies and cowering Kevins.

What is it with the left that they seek to infantilise the 'ignorant' masses?

The 'Kevin - Govt employee' ad currently screening - complete with the superimposition 'An actor has been used to protect government employees' - whines that if one doesn't sign a workplace agreement then 'no job'.

Funny that - one seems to remember that when one was a government employee, one was 'encouraged' to become a member of the union.

And one recalls distinctly that when one became a journalist in the 1970s, one was told the industry was a 'closed shop', which is to say one had to be a member of the Australian Journalists' Association (AJA) or one couldn't be employed.

Hmm - 1975: No union membership, no job = solidary. 2005: no workplace agreement, no job = 'A Threat To Australian Way Of Life'.

Ah, the rendolent stench of hypocrisy...

The greatest irony of all is that the 'closed shop' system was dismantled under a Labor government, that of Hawke and Keating. And that when the unions of Australia faced forced amalgamation under the same government (in which unions of (one recalls, but is willing to be corrected) 8000 members or less were obliged to amalgamate with other groups or be deregistered), the AJA was still virtually a closed shop - yet couldn't muster 8000 working bodies to survive in its own right (at a time when universities were oversupplying the market to the tune of 1000 journalism graduates each year).

The AJA ended up as the Media and Entertainment Arts Alliance, which means in Australia, journalists are members of the same union as circus clowns, cinema ticket sellers and actors. How appropriate.

And how ironic considering they had their chance to forge a meaningful alliance in the 1980s with the much bigger Printers and Kindred Industries Union but, seeing the printers as beneath them, refused to support the PKIU in several disputes, thus missing the opportunity to create a vertical integration which today would have allowed them to by-pass the illegality of 'sympathy' strikes and to literally 'stop the presses' during labour disputes.

Thus today, even if sympathy strikes were not illegal under workplace laws, Australia's journalists could only really call on on the cast of Neighbours and the bloke who pulls the lever on the ghost train to support them in the event of a dispute with their employers.

-- Nick